The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
An email signature block entity identifier needs to recognize various entities in an email signature block. For example, an email signature block may appear as follows:
John S. Smith, Manager, UX
jsmith@jigsaw.com
T. 650.202.8313|F. 650.202.8314|M. 932.421.3827
www.jigsaw.com|Enterprise|Developer|Community
An email signature block entity identifier should recognize that John is a first name, S. is a middle initial, Smith is a last name, Manager, UX is a title, jsmith@jigsaw.com is an email address, 650.202.8313 is a work phone, 650.202.8314 is a fax number, 932.421.3827 is a cell phone, and www.jigsaw.com is a website, making fine distinctions, such as those between the work phone, the cell phone, and the fax number. An email signature block entity identifier needs to be able to do the same for email signature blocks that are formatted differently. Regular expression based pattern matching approaches alone are inadequate for this challenge because an email signature block entity identifier cannot distinguish all of the various entities by regular expression patterns alone. For example, an email signature block entity identifier needs to be able to differentiate between John Smith, Manager and John Smith, Intel. An email signature block entity identifier using regular expression based pattern matching cannot discern that the entity of Manager is a job title and that the entity of Intel is a company name.